Variables
by blue-jean-serenades
Summary: He can feel the knowledge slipping like water through his fingers, and it terrifies him. S1.


**I would like to start by saying that Sam Winchester is possibly one of the most tragic fictional characters ever. He is also one of my favorite. I was a Sam!girl from the start—Dean is fabulous, but Sammy holds a special place in my heart. I relate to him a lot more than I do to Dean, and while every character on the show is epic (and I do love our little Deanybear, I promise!) … I don't know. I'm just a Sam girl. :) I also feel like Sammy is seriously underappreciated. Everyone loves Dean, and everyone hates Sam for having so many issues, but his dark side isn't his fault. In fact, it's part of what makes his character so deep and compelling.**

**And I was thinking the other day, and it suddenly occurred to me that not much is mentioned in the series about Sam's feelings after he left Stanford. I mean, yeah, obviously there was the whole Jessica thing, and Azazel—but he was always so smart, and he could have had so many **_**options**_**. There was so much he could have done with his life, but he just kept getting pulled back to the same violent line of work as his family. So I wanted to explore that a little—the pain he must have felt at losing everything he had worked so hard to achieve.**

**Here is the end result. It turned out kind of short—the A/N is almost longer than the fic. :P I don't know if I like it…you be the judge.  
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The days after he left Stanford were a slow and agonizing deterioration.

He could feel his mind growing less sharp with every night he spent cleaning guns in a dirty motel room, and it killed him. It was like the last few years were being erased right before his eyes—the universe's cruel joke, to have heaven dangled in front of him and then ripped away the instant before he reached it. Someone up there had in for him, he thought sometimes, when it was late and Dean had left the whiskey out. He hated falling back into the pattern, drifting back into the horrible routine of driving all night and impersonating law enforcement officers and hunting creatures that were only supposed to exist in nightmares.

He always knew he was different. When he was little and monsters hid under the bed, Sam calmed himself down by reciting the numbers of pi, 3.14159265358979, over and over like clockwork. There was a sense of security in being able to quantify the world—in reducing the things that went bump in the night to facts and figures, just another variable in the universe's giant equation. Sam reveled in the feeling of _knowing_, of that mystical power that had nothing to do with the supernatural but was still magic in its own way.

With each passing day, his time at Stanford seemed more and more like a dream. Sam cried the day he woke up and couldn't remember the fundamental theorem of calculus.

And Dean, as hard as he tried, could never understand. He hadn't even considered going to college; the thought of leading any life but the one he had grown up in had never even crossed his mind. Resent still burned in him, hatred for the demon that had stolen his mother. He was like John, consumed with revenge, and the only place he had ever known was by his father's side.

But if it wasn't for the pictures, Sam would not remember Mary. He felt no drive to chase wild geese through the backroads of America, and the only thing that burned in him was _want_—want for something else, for a life apart from his family, for a chance to live in a world free from nightmares. He wanted to be challenged, to be intellectually stimulated by his classes, by his teachers, by his peers. He wanted to live in a house he had to pay mortgage on and marry Jess and grow old and maybe have children someday, kids who would never have to watch their father walk out the door and wonder if he was going to come back. He wanted his brother to see him at Stanford, happy and filled with light like he had seldom been back at home, because maybe it would heal the wound he had caused when he left. He wanted a lot of things, but most of all what Sam wanted was to be normal.

That's all he had ever wanted, really. To be normal.

The Impala bumps along dusty roads and Sam presses his forehead against the cool glass window, reciting the thermodynamic properties of air under his breath because he's terrified of losing it, terrified that a day will come when he'll wake up and be left with nothing. He imagines himself five years from now, ten, twenty—still sleeping in crappy motel rooms, drinking too much, hunting wendigos and hustling pool. The same old routine, day in and day out, and if Sam had nightmares about anything other than Jess it would be about this.

He can't do anything about it, not a single thing. So he hunts and he sleeps and he drinks more than he should and he clings to his facts and numbers and variables, because they're the only thing that separates him from every other hunter he's ever known—and he loves his family, he truly does, but the thought of ending up like John scares the living shit out of him.

And when he's really tired, when he just can't make it another minute and his head feels like it's going to burst right out of his skull, he recites his multiplication tables. Because anything, _anything _at all, is better than nothing.

The tinny strains of Dean's ancient ACDC cassette tape filter through the speakers. Counting calms him, so Sam counts the telephone poles they pass on the freeway. He makes it to thirty-two before his head starts to swim, and his eyelids start to feel heavy.

Dean glances sideways at him. "G'night, Sammy," he says in a low voice.

Sam doesn't hear.

_Thirty-three. Thirty-four. Thirty-five._

When dawn breaks, and the orange-gold sun begins to shine through the cracks in the clouds, he is still counting.

FIN.


End file.
